Modifier Placement in English and Fulfulde Languages

This article is published in AL-QALAM Journal of Languages and Literary Studies, Vol. 1, Issue 1, December 2025 (A Publication of the Department of English and Literature, Federal University Gusau, Zamfara State, Nigeria)

MODIFIER PLACEMENT IN ENGLISH AND FULFULDE LANGUAGES

By

Saleh AHMAD Abdullahi Ph.D

Department of Languages, Nigerian Army University Biu, Borno State, Nigeria

Corresponding Author’s email and phone No: salehmadbiri24@gmail.com,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2221-083X +2348030481997

Abstract

This study examines modifier placement in English and Fulfulde languages. The paper is motivated by the fact that comparative syntax necessarily involves work on more than one language. It attempts to characterise and delineate the parameters that ultimately underlie cross-linguistic differences in syntax. Although the present study is simply a descriptive one, it serves as a significant resource and gives an input to descriptive analysis. This work explores modification in English and Fulfulde, taking into cognisance their distribution, forms and functions, their syntactic properties and the position they occupy in the languages. This study sources its data from primary and secondary sources. The primary source was of self-introspection which was indispensable owing to the fact that the researcher is a native speaker of Fulfulde and the secondary source is made up of materials drawn from existing documents. This study reveals that Fulfulde nominal modifications do not occur in pre-position but the adjectives in the language do occur. However, English nominal modifications do not occur in the attributive position but the adjectives in the language do occur in both predicative and attributive positions. They always follow the noun head they modify and exhibit an agreement property in both languages.

Keywords: Modifier Placement, Nominal Head, Head Noun, Syntactic Properties.

 

Introduction

This research primarily aims at making a comparative study of the modifier placement patterns in English and Fulfulde. The study focuses on the description of modifiers in English and Fulfulde within the noun phrase with a view to syntactically identifying and characterising the forms and functions of modification in the two languages on a comparative note. The subject of this study is the speakers of Gombe, because many corpuses can easily be obtained due to available access to published materials.

According to Crystal (2007), modification is a term used in syntax to refer to the structural dependence of one grammatical unit upon another but with different restriction in the scope of the term being introduced by different approaches. He goes on to say that “some reserve the term for structural dependence within any endocentric phrase as in “the big man in the garden”, both “the big” and “in the garden” modify “man”, characterized as pre-modification and post-modification respectively. He further adds that some linguists reserve the term for the pre-modifying structures only: in Hallidayan grammar, for example, the above phrase would have the structure M. H. Q, standing for; MODIFICATION-HEAD-QUALIFICATION. Traditional grammar, he further suggests, “reserved the term for adverbial units which were dependent on the VERB. A closer look at the above exposition of the term modification suggests that it is a syntactic phenomenon that occurs within various constituent types that include noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases as well as adverbial phrases and that modifiers can be placed either in pre-positions and post-positions. Thus, we need to also define more precisely the twin terms pre-modification and post-modification.

English language belongs to the Germanic sub-group of the Indo-European language family (Brown and Sarah, 2009). Although Chinese is spoken by a greater number of people, English is spoken around the globe with a wider dispersion than any other language. From its earlier home in Britain (now with 60 million speakers), it has spread to nearby Ireland (4 million), across the Atlantic to North America (where some 215 million residents over the age of five speak it in the United States and as many as 20 million in Canada) and across the world to Australia and New Zealand (with more than 20 million speakers).

English is the sole official language in many countries, such as Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zimbabwe in Africa; Jamaica, Bahamas, Dominica and Barbados in the Caribbean; and the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. Elsewhere it shares official status with one or more languages in other nations, including Tonga, Tanzania, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, Western Samoa, Kiribati, Pakistan and India (where it is an associate official language alongside Hindi) (Comrie, 2009). The canonical clause structure of English is SVO order. The noun phrase structure is such that nouns can be pre-modified by determiners, adjectives, and noun modifiers, in that order. Complex hierarchical structuring is possibly facilitated by the freedom with which nouns can act as modifiers; some determiners show number agreement; pre-modifying nouns are generally said to be unmarked for number. Relative clauses post-modify as do non-finite clausal modifiers. Relativized NPs can function as subjects; direct or oblique objects or possessives in relative clauses. Restrictive relative clauses are said to have a hybrid character: they can be integrated into a preceding noun phrase by simple juxtaposition by a relativiser (that) or by a relative pronoun (who, whom, which), which functions as an argument in the relative clause. The choice is subject to complex syntactic and stylistic constraints (Brown & Sarah, 2009).

On the other hand, Fulfulde (otherwise called Ful, Fula, Fulani, Pulaar, Pular; French: Peul) is an Atlantic language. Its closest relatives are Wolof and Sereer (Serer). Atlantic is a sub-branch of the Niger-Congo language family. Fulfulde language constitutes one large dialect continuum in Africa stretching over thousands of kilometers from Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea in the west to as far as Sudan and Ethopia in the east and to Cameroon, the central African Republic and Congo in the south (Breedvald, 1995). The Fulbe call their own language Pulaar or Pular in the dialect areas of Fuuta Tooro (Senegal, Mauritania) and Futaa Jaloo (Guinea, Sierra Leone) and Fulfulde in all other dialect areas, such as Maasina (Mali), Liptaako (Burkina Faso), Gombe (Nigeria), and Aadaamaawa (Cameroon) (Breedveld, 1995).

The basic clause structure is similarly SVO. However, the language morpho-syntactically differs from English, by virtue of the fact that it has a complex noun class and verbal systems. The dialect on which the present study makes it bases is the Gombe dialect. The estimated number of speakers varies wildly. Gordon (2005) puts the number at approximately four and a half million, but suggests that in total, speakers may number as high as twelve million. The UCLA Language Materials Project puts the number at between 12-15 million speakers. Estimates of dialects vary from two (as in Taylor, 1953) to six (as in (Arnott, 1970). Arnott’s monograph is based on the Gombe dialect, spoken in northeastern Nigeria, which he considers “more typical of Fula as a whole” (Arnott, 1970).

Fula is a five vowel language (with contrasting long vowels). However, Arnott (1970) marks what he terms the “salient syllable” with the diacritic (‘) over the relevant vowel. The consonant system contains 28 sounds, including four “glottalised” consonants. The language allows geminated consonants and has a full array of pre-nasalised stops.

Fula boasts a complex and unusual system of suffixally-marked noun class and concord. Each class suffix has several allomorphs or “grades” (as Arnott calls them), which combine with stems of the same “grade”. This fact has an effect on agreement morphology, since the “grade” of the suffix is determined by the individual stem, as agreement phrases show suffixes of the same class, but not necessarily the same form.

Literature Review

According to Arnott (I970), quite a number of research works have been carried out on Fulfulde. Some of the works were conducted over a hundred years ago. The only Fulfulde Grammar book written in English are the I953 reprint of Taylor’s (I92I) Grammar of the Adamawa Dialect and Lloyd Swift’s Pedagogic Basic Course (based on the Gambian variety). The researcher considers it valuable addition into English and Fulfulde languages with the specific interest to study modifier placement. Bankole (2015) posits that any grammatical unit is opposite to the enhancement of language usage. Both languages have modifiers but differ in their structural formation. They also use modifier as a basic supplementary component in their sentence formation which does not usually affect the grammaticality of the sentence when removed.

Nevertheless, Fulfulde nominal modifiers can only appear in the post-modification position and some adjectives appear in pre- and post-modifying position within an NP, whereas English nominal modifiers usually appear in the pre-modifying position, while adjectives occur in pre- and post-modifying position.

Several scholarly works were conducted on modification. This chapter highlights some of these with a view to providing a thorough and analytical framework for the present study. To begin with, Fries (1951) contends that it is counter-productive to attempt a study of modification based on the “conventional” definition, such as Braun’s (1947) that “a modifier is a word or group of words that adds to the meaning of another word”. He further strengthens his argument on the premise that “modifiers” cannot be defined in terms of meaning content but on the basis of structures. As such, he opines that modifiers must be described in terms of the formal units of which they are composed and the characteristics arrangements of these units.

More so, Christophersen & Sandved (1969) maintain that a structure of modification contains a head and a modifier. For example, according to them in “fresh air helps”, “fresh” is the modifier of the head word “air”. Although they assert that there are other than ones with nominal head, much of their analysis centres on the types of modifier with nominal head.

In addition, Cook (1969), in his Tagmemic theory analysis approach, describes modification structure as a subordinate endocentric structure in which “there is one head slot and a series of (optional) modifier slots”. He goes further to sub-classify head-modifier constructions according to the form-class of the word filling the head slot in the construction.

Yet another reference point in this study is Matthew’s (1981) proposition on modification structure, its relationship with the structure of complementation, and issues of optional and obligatory constituents. This is due to the divergent (and often contentious) views held by many linguists on the subject matter. Examining the general level of relationship among the constituents in a sentence structure, he reviews the notion of “endocentricity” which was introduced by Leonard Bloomfield in the 1930s. In the accounts of Hockett (1958) & Robins (1964), a construction is endocentric “if at least one of its elements can be substituted for the whole” (Matthew, 1981).

Further to the above, Stageberg (1981) asserts that a modifier is a subordinate element in an endocentric structure: “a word or group word that affects the meaning of a head word in that it describes, limits intensifies, and/or add to the meaning of the head. Thus, in the noun phrase “the blue shirt,” it limits by excluding all other colours, and it adds to the plain meaning of ‘shirt’.

Finally, we would consider the issue of obligatory and optional constituents in modification structure as enunciated by Brown & Miller (1991). According to them, a modifier is “a constituent that restricts the possible range of reference of some other constituent- the head.”

Nominal Modifiers and other kinds of Modification within the Noun Phrase

As already noted, it is well-known that modification of nouns by nouns is not the only form of specifying the reference of a head noun. There are other items which can, more or less prototypically, modify the head noun of an NP. These prototypical components in English language are mainly adjectives and genitive phrases, which occur in pre-modifying position, and also prepositional phrases and relative clauses, which occur in post-modifying position. However, in the case of Fulfulde, all the prototypical items mentioned mostly occur in post-modifying position, as Iya (2011) affirms.

One of the questions that the use of nouns as modifiers may raise is: why do we use them instead of other devices, such as prepositional phrases or adjectives, when, as is often the case, they are semantically analogous? In what follows, a survey of these other kinds of modification is offered. Also, reasons for the preference of one option over another are also briefly discussed.

The Pre-modifying Position

Modification in a noun phrase structure, whether by adjectives or genitive phrases, has been discussed extensively in the literature. Grammars such as those of Huddleston and Pullum (2002) and Quirk (1985) contain useful surveys of the functions and uses of both kinds of pre-modifying items. As regards the contrasts between them and nouns, the work by Rosenbach (2007) on the variation between determiner genitives and noun modifiers in English hypothesizes that there is fuzziness between the functions of genitive constructions and N+N combinations. Examples:

1.      a. Bush’s Administration

b. The Bush Administration

However, not all noun modifiers behave in the same way and sometimes pre-modifying nouns lack a corresponding adjective. As an illustration, Giegerich (2004) considers that in N+N combinations such as steel bridge, N1 plays the same role as a descriptive adjective. In the event that such an adjective exists, it would have to be denominal, that is, *steelen, like golden.

Component Parts of Pre-modification

Pre-modifying position is usually and prototypically filled by adjectives (a sad scene), but also by participles (the stolen book /the rising sun) and nouns (a car crash). In addition, there are other less frequent types of pre-modifying items, such as genitives (this airplane’s crew), phrases (a round-the-corner shop), and sentences (I don’t know how many people). As has been previously noted in the English language, nouns and adjectives act as pre-modifiers which provide the noun phrase with a static character since they themselves are static. Nevertheless, this tendency towards some sort of permanence is also observed in the case of participles. Thus, a working man is not a man who is working at a given time but a man who works habitually.

 The Order of Pre-modifiers

As we know, the sequence into which these modifying items may appear is not entirely free, since there is an order that depends on a number of factors, such as the intended meaning and the type of pre-modifier. In the noun phrase structure, two different ordering constraints can be found. Rigid ordering constraints imply that their violation must give rise to an ungrammatical structure. For example, changing the order of the indefinite article and a noun in English gives rise to an ungrammatical NP.

2.      a. an apple

b. *apple an

Labile ordering constraints, on the other hand, imply that a change of order will not give rise to an ungrammatical structure; such constraints simply give the preferred order in the default case. Thus, departures from this order will often be of questionable acceptability but may be justified by considerations of scope and information packaging (Payne & Huddleston, 2002) Thus, in examples below;

3.      a. I want to wear a long red dress

b.      I want to wear a red long dress

Possible Combinations

Multiple pre-modification also implies that pre-modifying items may be coordinated. These are examples of coordinated pre-modifiers.

4.      a. She was an absent and forgetful person

b. He gave me some honey and jam jars

In both examples, there are two coordinated pre-modifiers which belong to the same category: two adjectives in the case of (32a) and two nouns in the case of (32b). Quirk (1985) notes that there is no possibility for a coordination of pre-modifiers from different categories, such as a noun and an adjective.

5.       *the local and water board authorities

Likewise, there are cases in which the coordination is placed in the head position.

6.      Body fluids and chemicals

in which a single noun pre-modifies the coordinated head nouns fluids and chemicals. This kind of construction may yield some sort of ambiguity, since one may wonder whether the single modifier is referring to one or both of the coordinated head nouns.

The Post-modifying Position

As noted, Levi (1978) views N+N structures as deriving from underlying sentences which depend on a set of nine different predicates. In most cases, nominal combinations can indeed be replaced by underlying sentences with a relative clause.

7.      a. a stone wall

            b. a wall which is made of stone

c. a wall of stone

As far as meaning is concerned, the three constructions apparently mean the same thing. However, differences are found in the permanence of a given referent in time or in its utility as a means of communicating efficiently and economically. These are the reasons why speakers choose to use one or the other, depending on the effect they wish to achieve on their audience.

To conclude, the choice of one or the other modifying element depends on two main factors: subtle meaning differences and pragmatic differences of permanence and specificity. Speakers are generally not consciously aware of these differences and choose among the possibilities available to create a specific construct according to their communicative goals.

Morphological Properties of Nouns as Modifiers

As Warren (1993) reminds us, nominal modifiers, because of their restrictive function, tend to lose their ability to be inflected and thus usually appear in a singular form. For example, in Fulfulde:

8.      Soroowo depte

(Seller book)

Book seller

There are even cases of nouns which usually have a plural inflection in their referential uses. Example;

9.      Sarla – trouser; sgl

Sarlaji – trousers

(which identify an inflection in its referential use).

Nevertheless, Adams (1973) raises the possibility of considering the first elements in N+N structures as grammatically neutral rather than morphologically singular, arguing that on some occasions it is in fact the “s” genitive rather than the plural s that is lost (e. g. pigtail <pig’s tail). The lack of plural marking might also be a consequence of the reduced referentiality of noun modifiers, a conclusion drawn by Rosenbach (2005) on the basis of web-based analysis. They found that the dependent Bush in the Bush Administration was less likely to be referred to in the previous or subsequent context than in the case of a genitive like Bush’s Administration. This implied that the modifying noun Bush was less salient, i. e., more backgrounded than the genitive.

Methodology

This study obtains its data from both primary and secondary sources. The primary source is native speaker intuition, which is indispensable owing to the fact that the researcher is a native speaker of Fulfulde and has the expertise and linguistic skills to research on the syntax of Fulfulde especially in the process of modifier placement. It is also an iterative process with other Fulfulde speakers. This study has to do with rigorous brainstorming by the researcher because it does not come across any preserved data on Fulfulde modifier placement. The study originally composes the data that is used in the work for analysis. On the other hand, secondary sources are made up of materials drawn from existing documents, published and unpublished materials, books, and dictionaries. Libraries were also of tremendous importance to the study; electronic libraries and internet sources are not left out. The data obtained from the Fulfulde language was quantified via transliteration and translation. All words are grouped under their various word classes, broken down into their various morphemes, described and well explained. The meanings of all the words are given either semantically or pragmatically.

However, cognizance was taken of the morpho-syntactic characteristics of English and Fulfulde languages as compared. The Fulfulde written corpus had further been translated at two levels. The first level is what is referred to as item-for-item (“word for word”) translation. This was then reduced to its “idiomatic” English translation to get the exact content of the expression.

Data Presentation, Analysis and Discussion

As in many languages, the Fulfulde NP is made up of an obligatory head, noun (and pronoun) with [N+] feature and other optional items called modifiers and specifiers which may occur after the head noun. The head noun may be inflected for number and there is usually morphological and phi-feature agreement between the noun and its associated constituent units. The data available to us leads to the assertion that Fulfulde nouns are morphologically either simple or complex. The simple nouns consist of only one indivisible form, while the complex nouns (i.e DNs) can be made up of different structural forms which result from different derivational operations. Nominal qualifiers usually restrict the meaning of the modified noun in a given grammatical structure. The modifiers include determiners, adjectives, nominals and pronominals. By this description, typical NP constituents in Fulfulde may have the structural patterns listed below:

(i) Noun - Determiner

(ii) Noun – Determiner - Determiner

(iii)Noun – Adjective

(iv) Noun- Determiner – Adjective

A computational analysis of these sequences reveals that the morphological forms of the modifiers greatly determine the type of noun they modify.

The Head Noun

What is called noun in Fulfulde occurs in two basic forms:

(i)                 Simple

(ii)              Derived

The head noun (HN) could be any of these forms. In the sections that follow, the study describes the internal computation of the two morphological forms.

The Simple Noun

The study describes the noun that comprises only a single morphological form as ‘the simple noun’. In the data in the examples below, I present the simple root nouns in their different morpheme structure.

Simple Noun	Gloss
Ngesa	Farm
dem-gal	Tongue
Ndabbawa	Animal
Parantiwol	Plate
Shanshado	Spider
Nneb’bam	Palm
Simple Noun	Gloss
Luumo	Market
Neddo	Person
Iyal	Bone
Marori	Rice
Nyenbe	Beans

The nouns in the above cannot be further divided into small constituents to account for their form and meaning, unless additional affixation can be realized in some of them to pluralize them or can be totally substituted with another morpheme structure to form their plurals.

The Derived Noun                                              

The noun forms that we refer to as complex consist of nouns which are derived by employing the following derivational processes:

(i) Suffixation                                 (ii)……nga, nde, ndi, jol, placement          

(iii) Reduplication and                    (iv) Compounding.

In each case, the component parts of the DNs are realized from the morpheme structure. Knowledge of these parts is important in deciphering the derived meaning of each complex noun form. Syntactically, each part constitutes a distinct semantic unit whose combination translates to one simple semantic unit.

Derived Noun by Suffixation

Suffixation is the most productive derivational process for expanding the category of nouns in the Fulfulde language. This process involves putting a nominalising suffix before an appropriate verb and other word classes that can undergo the process. This is the most common process of word derivation in Fulfulde than any other process mentioned above. For instance;

Base	Suffix	Remarks	Classes
Nbee	nbee-wa	Goat	-wa
Hund	hund-ko	Mouth	-ko
Law	laaw-ol	Path	-ol
Haal	haal-a	Talk	-a

 

Nominal Modifiers

Another major constituent part of the Fulfulde NP involves nominal modifiers. In this, the study examines the interaction between the head noun and its varying modifiers. This interaction results in the structural patterns illustrated in the data. The HN and the modifiers stand in some kind of agreement relation which is discussed in the next sub-section of this study. The modifiers include determiners, adjectives, nominals and pronominals.

The Determiner Category

The determiner refers to a class of items which co-occur with a noun to express a wide range of semantic contrasts such as quantity or number. Determiners in Fulfulde are associated with nominal classes. The class of the noun determiner is modifying or qualifying select the determiner. For instance;

10.  deftere ndemo janngi

(Noun+Dem+pro+verb)

This book she reads         

On the above example ‘nde’ is a noun determiner which modifies ‘deftere’ which has the position as compared with the ones in the English language; (i.e) it occupies the post-modifying position in contrast with the ones in the English language, but this is what mostly occurs in Fulfulde. The determiner group in Fulfulde includes:

(i)                 Article

(ii)              Demonstratives

(iii)            Quantifiers.

Some of these can occur mostly after a noun in Fulfulde as shown in the data below:

The a-c examples above show the modification of nouns with the definite article ‘o’n’. This article post-modifies nouns and encodes the notion of definiteness which is commonly characterized in semantic terms involving inclusiveness, uniqueness, accessibility or identifiability. The forms within the optional brackets represent the actual pronunciations of the NPs in a rapid speech.

 The a-f examples above show the modification of noun by quantifiers. These include numeral and non-numeral quantifiers which also post-modify nouns like the demonstratives but not like the ones in the English language which pre-modify the noun head. The numerals have definite reference like the def. arts. and dems., the non-numeral quantifiers have indefinite references. Definite numerals are modifiers that make exact specification to referents. (i.e) ‘go’otel’ which has definite reference, while ‘duuddum’ is the non-numeral quantifiers that has indefinite referent. The examples show that the modification of Fulfulde nouns by determiners results in the realisation of two different NP-constructions:

(i)                 N + Det and

(ii)              N + Det + Det construction.

The Adjectival Category

Adjectives are words which describe nouns. Only a few real adjectives are attested in Fulfulde. Many of the adjectives are derived and ideophonic. For instance;

Base	Suffix
Balee	(-wal)
Balee	(-yel)
Balee	(-ho)
Bodee	(-ho)
Bodee	(-jo)
Bodee	(-jum)

The data below illustrate the modification of nouns with the different adjectives.

 

The different adjectives in a-d post-modify nouns like the demonstratives and quantifiers in the example 11 above. Notice that the internal structure of the derived adjectives in 62 c-d show that they are reduced relative clauses. The nominal categories in this study include nouns and pronominals. Each of these post-modifies a noun. The modification of nouns by nouns result in the kind of NP it referred to as ‘associative construction’ or noun-noun construction’. A typical N-N construction in Fulfulde consists of two nouns linked by the associative marker (AM). The pronominals occur as nominal modifiers in this section are possessive pronouns as the data presented below show:

 

 

As shown above, the N-N construction in Fulfulde does not make gender difference whether using ‘mako’ or ‘am’. This shows that not all pronominals in Fulfulde make differences in gender and this as well shows how possessive pronominals act as modifiers to the HN in the phrases a-c which appear in the post-modifying position to the HN, unlike in the English language in which they occur in the pre-modifying position.

Summary of Findings

This study is undertaken with a view of cross-linguistically studying the distributions and interpretation of modifier placement in English and Fulfulde Languages within noun phrase. That the following findings were derived from the study:

1.      English and Fulfulde languages have modifiers but they differ in their structural formation.

2.      Both languages consider modification as a basic supplementary component in their sentence formation which does not usually affect the grammatical formation of sentence when removed.

3.      English and Fulfulde languages place their modifiers close to the head nouns, but they differ in the application of such in their position especially the nominal modifiers; English modifiers are usually placed before and after the head noun, while Fulfulde applies its modifiers in the post modification position.

4.      English language categorises grammatical articles into definite and indefinite, but Fulfulde does not recognize such classification, because the situation of a phrase or an expression in Fulfulde determines the article to be used. For example;

a man – Neddo on

the man – Neddo on

Note: you can as well say Neddo dum (the man), the situation of that phrase determines the appropriate articles to be used.

5.      Fulfulde nominal modifiers can only appear in the post-modification position and some adjectives appear in pre- and post-modifying positions within an NP, whereas English nominal modifiers usually appear in the pre-modifying position while Adjectives occur in pre- and post-modify position.

6.      Demonstratives in Fulfulde behave akin to English demonstratives, because they serve the same function (i.e) as modifier to the head noun/pronoun. For example;

b.      Korowal ngeél woda – that chair is bad

ii. ndeé dum debte Faruk – these are Faruk’s books

Conclusion

This study concludes that the conceptual explanation about nominal modifier bears a universal appreciation as one of the syntactic component in a language which specifies, demonstrates, and qualifies the HN (i.e Noun or Pronoun). An attempt has been made in this study to examine the internal composition of the Fulfulde NP bearing in mind the two basic parts: (i) the head noun and (ii) nominal modifiers. The research identifies five structural types of NP constructions in Fulfulde. Focus has been put on the modifier placement and pattern of agreement relation between the various elements found in the NP constructions. The head noun was characterised as constituting both simple and derived forms. However, most world languages have components that usually use the HN in construction whether in a pre-modifying position, post-modifying position or both positions, so Fulfulde language is not an exception. This study found out that modifiers in Fulfulde language can only occur in post-modifying position, whereas English accepts both pre-modification and post-modification.

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